Edinburgh Research Explorer Mind, body, and metaphor in Ancient Greek concepts of emotion Citation for published version: Cairns, D 2016, 'Mind, body, and metaphor in Ancient Greek concepts of emotion', L'Atelier du centre de recherche historique, vol. 16, no. Histoire intellectuelle des émotions. https://doi.org/10.4000/acrh.7416 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.4000/acrh.7416 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: L'Atelier du centre de recherche historique General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. 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Douglas Cairns Mind, Body, and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotion ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Avertissement Le contenu de ce site relève de la législation française sur la propriété intellectuelle et est la propriété exclusive de l'éditeur. Les œuvres figurant sur ce site peuvent être consultées et reproduites sur un support papier ou numérique sous réserve qu'elles soient strictement réservées à un usage soit personnel, soit scientifique ou pédagogique excluant toute exploitation commerciale. La reproduction devra obligatoirement mentionner l'éditeur, le nom de la revue, l'auteur et la référence du document. 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URL : http:// acrh.revues.org/7416 ; DOI : 10.4000/acrh.7416 Éditeur : Centre de Recherches Historiques http://acrh.revues.org http://www.revues.org Document accessible en ligne sur : http://acrh.revues.org/7416 Document généré automatiquement le 26 mai 2016. L'Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques – Revue électronique du CRH est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 3.0 France. Mind, Body, and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotion 2 Douglas Cairns Mind, Body, and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotion 1 Metaphor plays a central role in the formation of emotional concepts, as indeed in the formation of concepts in general. Typically, this is a matter of mapping the concrete onto the abstract and the physical onto the psychological.1 To that extent, a culture’s emotional categories are experiential, based on the interaction of embodied human beings with their environments via metonymies and metaphors that derive from such experience. The properties of emotions so conceived are not objectively given, but felt; they depend not just on objective processes in the body, the brain, and the world, but on the representation of the phenomenology of such processes in the intersubjective system that is language. To the extent that they are informed by metaphors and metonymies drawn from the phenomenology of the emotions in question, the relevant emotional concepts are constrained by physical embodiment and a shared external reality, but they are also variable. Though they exist in the shared and intersubjective system of language, their valence and salience will doubtless vary, at least to some extent, from one individual to another; they will certainly vary from one linguistic community to another. Accordingly, though the study of emotional metaphor requires considerable focus on features that are shared among cultures and periods, this is an enterprise with a substantial comparative and historical aspect. Even where universal or at least widely shared features and mechanisms are deployed, we need to pay the closest attention to the particularity of the concept in its historical and cultural context, and to be sensitive to variation through time and among cultures. 2 In this paper, I look at two examples that will, I hope, illustrate both the universal and the particular in the use of emotion-metaphor in ancient Greece. These represent, in my view, two of the more interesting cases, and they will help to show something of the spectrum of emotion- metaphor, one example being based on an involuntary physical symptom, and the other on the symbolic representation of emotion through dress. As already noted, however, these cases exist against a background in which metaphor is all-pervasive in the construction of emotional concepts; for constraints of space, this is a background on which the present paper will need to remain more or less silent. 2 Phrikê 3 My first example is phrikê. Phrikê as we shall see, can be the name of an emotion, but its primary significance lies in its reference to a physical symptom that is common to a range of emotional and non-emotional events, namely the phenomenon of piloerection (‘goose pimples’), shivering, or shuddering. Phrikê is an experience of an animal, but what the application of the term pinpoints is the visible aspect of that experience in the eyes of others. When this term is applied to an emotional experience, what we are dealing with is (in the strict sense) the phenomenology of emotion, i.e. the shared, third-person perspective that we all have (notwithstanding the standard philosophical puzzles about the communicability of qualia) of what it is like to experience the emotion in the first person. To be sure, phrikê is a subjective experience, but it is a subjective experience with an external, visible aspect, and it is this external, visible aspect that allows us to relate that person’s visible shudder, via the implicit theory of mind that we develop from infancy, to our own subjective experience of shuddering and of the emotions of which shuddering is a symptom. 4 Phrikê thus belongs, in its primary sense, to the basic somatic level of emotion. Sources such as the Hippocratic corpus, other medical writings, and the collections of Problemata attributed to Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias all give ample evidence of its basic somatic aspect.3 These sources are well-nigh unanimous in relating phrikê and its cognates to bodily temperature: we shiver when we are cold, and when we shudder or shiver in other circumstances (e.g. when we are afraid, when we are suffering from various physical L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 16 | 2016 Mind, Body, and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotion 3 ailments, when we sneeze, when we urinate, after eating, etc.) variations in bodily temperature are normally also implicated.4 The link between shuddering/shivering and piloerection is frequently noted,5 and this can in turn provide a cue for comment on the occurrence of phrikê also in non-human animals, both in circumstances which we should describe as emotional and in other, non-emotional scenarios.6 Phrikê, therefore, is an involuntary bodily movement, one that is part of human beings’ pre-human inheritance and rooted in basic systems of bodily regulation that respond to changes in the temperature of the organism and of the environment. 5 As a physical symptom, the phenomenon that phrikê names is an undeniable fact of human and non-human physiology and symptomology. As a symptom of emotion, and especially of fear-like emotions, it is a member of a set of related symptoms that are also recognized in our own folk models (‘I shudder to think’, ‘it gives me the shivers’, ‘he was in a cold sweat’, ‘she’s got cold feet’, ‘it was a chilling/hair-raising experience’), and confirmed by empirical investigation.7 The fact that phrikê is a symptom of fear and similar emotions in Greek is an important one, for the same symptom remains an important sign of such emotions and an important aspect of the concept of those emotions in English and other modern languages.8 This